After the first two editions of the SSAS Tabular Workshop, I and Alberto had some time to flush some of the pending activities. We published two articles: Clever Hierarchy Handling in DAX: DAX is not a hierarchy-friendly language, especially if you have a MDX background. If you have to implement hierarchy-based calculation, MDX is still ...

We finally have the registration website for the community event about Tabular in Analysis Services in Amsterdam on April 16 evening that I introduced in my previous post - don't miss it, the registration are open (and limited!) at:
http://passnl-april2012.eventbrite.com/
This is really a ''last-minute'' event, but we're pretty confident ...

Next week I will finally start the roadshow of the SSAS Tabular Workshop, a 2-day seminar about the new BISM Tabular model for Analysis Services that has been introduced in SQL Server 2012. During these roadshows, we always try to arrange some speeches at local community events in the evening - we already defined for Copenhagen, we ...

If you have a Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) Type 2 for your customer and you want to calculate the number of distinct customers that bought a product, you cannot use the simple formula:
Customers := DISTINCTCOUNT( FactTable[Customer Id] ) )
because it would return the number of distinct versions of customers. What you really want to do is to ...

I, Alberto and Chris spent many months (many nights, holidays and also working days of the last months) writing the book we would have liked to read when we started working with Analysis Services Tabular. A book that explains how to use Tabular, how to model data with Tabular, how Tabular internally works and how to optimize a Tabular model. All ...

In January I published an article about how to optimize high cardinality columns in VertiPaq. In the meantime, VertiPaq has been rebranded to xVelocity: the official name is now “xVelocity in-memory analytics engine (VertiPaq)” but using xVelocity and VertiPaq when we talk about Analysis Services has the same meaning. In this post I’ll ...

One week ago Microsoft SQL Server 2012 finally debuted with a virtual launch event and you can find many intro sessions there (20 minutes each). There is a lot of new content available if you want to learn more about SQL 2012 and in this blog post I’d like to provide a few link to sessions, documents, bits and courses that are available now or ...

A few months ago I gave a speech at SQLBits 9 comparing Vertipaq vs. OLAP (you can watch session recording here), which I repeated a few times in other conferences and webcasts. The title was intentionally provocative but it contained an explanation of the real content – in fact it is “Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach”. In ...

Thanks to Greg Galloway that pointed me out this is possible, in this post I want to show how to create a measure local to a session. This could be done in SQL Server Management Studio, even if it is probably not so useful for a Tabular model considering that you can easily define measures local to a DAX query. However, maybe you will have a ...

I recently wrote an article about how to implement a Process Add on a table in a Tabular model. This is an area where there is a lack of documentation by Microsoft, especially if you want to use a custom binding query for every Process Add command, which should be the common case for a Process Add scenario. Cathy Dumas wrote several blog posts ...